Welcome to Research Repository UCD

Research Repository UCD is a digital collection of open access scholarly research publications from University College Dublin. Research Repository UCD collects, preserves and makes freely available publications including peer-reviewed articles, working papers and conference papers created by UCD researchers. Where material has already been published it is made available subject to the open-access policies of the original publishers. This service is maintained by UCD Library.

Using Department of Environment data on number of mortgages by size category we find that the Weibull distribution accurately models the distribution of loans under €300,000 but severely underestimates the number of larger loans. We therefore use a a Pareto distribution for loans above this level. We estimate that from 2006 to 2008 there were fewer than 2,000 loans over €1 million with total value of €3 billion; and that there were 11,000 loans over €500,000 with estimated value of €9 billion. While the number of people taking out these mortgages is unknown, the conjecture that the largest 10,000 mortgage borrowers owe around €10 billion, largely for buy to let mortgages, does not appear implausible given these results. More tentatively, an ecological inference procedure suggests that interest only mortgages went almost exclusively to property investors.

Google ScholarTM

This item is available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland. No item may be reproduced for commercial purposes. For other possible restrictions on use please refer to the publisher's URL where this is made available, or to notes contained in the item itself. Other terms may apply.